Unbelievably, I’m already four days into a third year field course with Durham undergraduates, based in Pontresina, in the Upper Engadine valley in Switzerland, and we’re having a blast. It’s a long time since I’ve been somewhere with such a diverse and colourful flora and the wonderful, integrated Swiss transport system is making it very easy to make our way around this beautiful valley.

We did the whole trip from Durham, in fact, on public transport, getting the 7am Eurostar from St Pancras to Paris last Friday, with a brief stop for brunch before travelling on to Zurich. Everything went smoothly, with straightforward connections. From Zurich, we were whisked along the lake, with its fabulous mountain backdrop, but after we changed to the local train at Chur, the scenery became even more dramatic. The track ascends in a series of curves, and sometimes even complete spirals, from 400 m above sea level to 1777 m, over a distance of some 80 or 90 km. There are tunnels built into sheer rock faces and viaducts, the height of which make Durham’s look like a toy.  The train even went slowly enough up the incline in places for some trackside botanising – meadows full of wild carrot, Echium, Campion and Ox-eye daisies and, as we ascended higher, Bistort and Harebells. We arrived at Pontresina around 12 hours after leaving St Pancras with a real sense of having travelled to a very different place.

Pontresina itself sits in a sheltered U-shaped valley around 1800 m above sea level and even around the village the diversity of plants is amazing. We however, with comprehensive travel passes from the hostel where we’re staying, can make use of chair lifts, cable cars and the funicular railway to get us quickly up to the alpine zone proper. With a couple of days to recce sites before the students arrived, we got the chair lift up the restaurant on Alp Languard (2300 m) on our first morning here and
climbed slowly up to the Sengantini hut (2800 m) for a late lunch, enjoying stunning views, the amazing variety of alpine plants and the first marmots of the trip along the way.

Another lady looking at the plants as she walked told us that the French call Moonwort (Botrychium) ‘Devil’s Grip’ or the ‘Hand of God’, because of its curled fertile fronds! We paid a lot at the hut for delicious sharing platters and very welcome cold beer – hardly surprising it comes at a price, given the difficulty of getting any supplies there – I can only think they drop stuff from one of the helicopters we frequently see buzzing around the valleys.

It was another couple of hours walk our lunch stop to the top of the Muottas Muragl funicular railway, which we got down the mountain before walking almost straight onto a bus back to Pontresina. I can’t praise the connectivity and convenience of the Swiss public transport system enough!

All in all we had an amazing first day – wall-to-wall sunshine and crystal clear views but not too hot. Somehow I had 220 photos, mostly of the hundreds of plants in flower, on my camera when I got back. I couldn’t see how the students wouldn’t also be blown away by the diversity and it was immensely reassuring to realise we’d picked such a good time for the trip! We won’t be walking the students this way as it just took too long but it was really useful to have seen the range of alpine plants in flower and to have identified most of the common species.